34

We’re almost there. The orange blossom is back. No longer the odd-smelling raw material with hints of snapped peapods and raindrops on hot asphalt I smelled that first day in Bertrand’s lab, the orange blossom absolute that tugged at my memory. Now it’s fully fleshed out, a flower, a tree, a plazaful of trees with their clusters of white stars and their dark waxy-green leaves and the wrinkled unpicked bitter oranges from the previous year, as though lighting up the night-time scene with lavender had released the flowers’ scent – Bertrand had told me at the very outset that we needed to find the nightlights, the flares …

Everything he’s been trying to put into Duende all along is finding its place at last. This is the nectar-laden floral accord he’d been perfecting when I derailed the process by bringing in Habanita. But now it’s got authority. It belongs. He nods.

‘That’s it, exactly. When I first used the lavender, I was trying to close the loop before I’d even drawn the circle. Now we’ve got our structure, so I can put back everything I had to take out, the way it’s supposed to be, where it’s supposed to go.’

We settle on N°63 after smelling mods numbers 56 to 64: it’s the one where the orange blossom expresses itself most beautifully against the backdrop of the balsamic resinous base. Each element in the formula adds its vibrancy to the others: the wood accord boosts the slightly spicy facets of the jasmine; the jasmine, boosted by the wood, resonates with the orange blossom through their common indolic facets – Bertrand says it’s ‘like a domino effect’. As a result, all the secondary accords, the green, the balsamic, the musky, have also become more ample without crowding each other.

I’m also getting … something boozy? Bertrand nods again, looking impish.

‘I’ve worked in an ethereal, alcoholic effect in the top notes.’

‘Because…?’

‘Because it’s a boozy night, you told me so yourself!’

True. We were downing quite a lot of manzanilla. Its almondy, woody aromas are easily conjured by the notes in Duende; the tiny drop of blood that seeps through carries the wine’s saline sea breeze … The rum absolute he put in doesn’t read like rum, but as it whooshes upwards it gives an exhilarating jolt to the green top notes: makes them smile. That’s something he’d been looking for too.

But as everything in Duende is falling into place, my own position is shifting. Bertrand tells me how impressed he was with my report on Duende N°55:

‘You really know how to smell now. I won’t touch N°63 until you tell me what you think.’

It’s taken me a year to get there; it’s taken him a year to listen. Hasn’t anything I’ve said up to now made any difference?

‘You brought me the story.’

Ah.

‘I had to wait until I was satisfied with what I’d done before I could listen…’

‘And now you’re satisfied. So what do you need me for?’

‘Now I need you as an evaluator.’

That pinches a little. However useful an evaluator’s input is, it’s mostly technical and commercial: she’s not working on her story but on a client’s brief. It’s not a moment of her life that’s being bottled. Duende comes from me as much as it comes from Bertrand, and whatever I’ve been to him throughout the year, I am much more than an evaluator. Aren’t I?

‘OK, so you are a muse…’

It’s the first time he’s said the word. I’d kiss him smack on the top of the head, if he weren’t saying it in such a teasing tone.

‘… and an evaluator.’

OK, so now I could bang his head against the counter. But of course I’ll do it. Who knows Duende better than I do, after him? I’m pretty sure that of all the people he works with, no one follows the development of their product as closely as I do. Do they?

‘Never.’

I think back to what Christian Astuguevieille told me: that much of his work with perfumers was learning to talk with them. Those long hours Bertrand and I spent together, huddled over blotters, were spent looking for a common language. Bertrand corrects me:

‘Looking for a common emotion, for the moment when we’d both go “ah” … A meeting of the souls.’

And that’s happened during the last session. In a way, Duende is done. From now on he’ll focus on rebalancing proportions without adding any new materials to the formula. My mission will be to keep track of certain aspects of the development that might need polishing: whether the cat pee facet in the blackcurrant base sticks out too much; if the aldehydes are too screechy; if the new ethereal, boozy effect works well. Whether the scent evolves harmoniously rather than splitting up into two different volumes like it did in N°55. How long it lasts on skin; if it carries; if I get compliments on it … But even if the next mods are just tweaks, we’re well on for going over 70. How does that measure up to the other work he’s been doing, I wonder?

‘The most mods I’ve done were for a Penhaligon’s product. I was up to 78. So I’d say it’s getting to be pretty sophisticated.’

The competitive streak in me is speaking up and I make a mental note of pushing to 80. Suddenly Bertrand looks me in the eye, scowling:

‘But, believe me, that’s nothing compared to the way I used to work with my colleagues in the big companies! Those people who called the shots, they didn’t have a clue about what they were doing. They kept changing their minds. We did thousands of mods, and there could have been ten masterpieces among them, but those were never the ones they picked! The perfumers work themselves sick on a chunk of the road that’s two metres wide, when there’s a whole highway of creativity that should be open to them! But no! No one ever goes past those two metres because, beyond, it’s the unknown!’

Clearly, the memory of the years he spent slogging over commercial products still rankles. I’ve seldom seen him so worked up. But surely those days are over for him, aren’t they? He shakes his head.

‘No, I’m still restraining myself a lot, because I’d love to work on raw materials that are imbitable, but people wouldn’t understand. They just wouldn’t.’

There’s that word again. I did suspect he wasn’t being entirely in good faith when he said he wanted to move away from the difficult notes.

‘But I’ll do it anyway. We’re going to try to impose a certain idea of perfumery. We’ll tilt against windmills. I’m Don Quixote!’

Well, Mr D., don’t expect me to play Sancho Panza, the paunchy peasant who trails after the deluded knight errant as his squire. But though Duende is far from imbitable – it’s got the lushness of an old-time classic, like a modernist rewrite of a Guerlain – I’m more than willing to gallop alongside you as a fellow knight with a battery of atomizers tucked in my ammo belt. We’ll spray those windmills until they spread the waft.